A collection of animated films created using the paperless animation application TVPaint Animation

3/24/08

Eric Goldberg : "Racetrack" Drew Carey's Green Screen

This piece wasn't animated directly with TVP or Mirage , but does show how TVP can be used to color animation with a "hand-painted" look. The drawings were done on paper , then scanned into Mirage (an earlier version of TVP) for coloring.

There's more about that in the linked article from AWN , so take a look . I think that the Racetrack segment from Green Screen is as fine and funny a piece of animation as you're likely to see , so just for the pure enjoyment factor I wanted to share this .

"Drew Carey's Green Screen Show" featured Drew Carey as the host , and an ensemble cast of improv actors doing skits in front of a "green screen" . After the live actors had done their stuff , the footage was handed over to various animators (coordinated by Acme Film Works) to embellish the skit with animation. The show never really took off , and like all improv sketches there were hits and misses . One of the hits, in fact probably the strongest piece that came out of this show, was a sequence called "Racetrack" animated by master animator Eric Goldberg.

In an article on Animation World Network there is a bit about the production process they used on the piece . I was interested to note that they used Mirage for the ink & paint. Notice how the drawings have a beautiful, organic hand-colored look , like watercolor washes or markers.

According to the article :

Without pre-sketching or testing, Goldberg animated with ink directly on paper, working in a style he was comfortable with, allowing for a certain amount of boil and spontaneity. He wanted the game's horse character to have the same scratchy, rubber-hose freedom of the Fleischer and Krazy Kat cartoons.

His wife, Susan Goldberg , assisted as art director, and his two daughters helped with mattes. Using Shake for compositing and Mirage for ink-and-paint, Scott Johnston helped achieve the animation's watercolor look.

Goldberg was committed to putting in as much technical detail as possible, such as the secondary action of the horse's reigns (animated by Todd Jacobson), because it makes the piece more convincing and compelling to watch. Goldberg feels this added effort adds a quality and touch that really sells the whole illusion.

As I've mentioned before, the application called "Mirage" is no longer available as such . The company that used to sell Mirage , Bauhaus Software, no longer sells it . However the software development company (TVPaint Development Co.) that originally developed Mirage has taken over and is now marketing a much improved version of Mirage as TVP Animation.